U.S. Agency for International Development staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration: Northern Gaza had turned into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland” with dire shortages of food and medical aid.

Three months after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip, the internal message laid out in gruesome detail scenes observed by United Nations staff who visited the area on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.

The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”

But the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the cable from wider distribution within the United States government because they believed it lacked balance, according to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters.

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Reuters saw one of those cables. The other four, also blocked by Lew and Hallett because of their concerns about balance, were described by four former officials.

Three former U.S. officials said that the descriptions were unusually graphic and would have commanded the attention of senior U.S. officials had the message been widely circulated within Joe Biden’s administration.

It would have also deepened scrutiny of a National Security Memorandum, issued by Biden that month, which conditioned the supply of U.S. intelligence and weapons on Israel’s compliance with international law, they said.

"While cables weren't the only means of providing humanitarian information ... they would have represented an acknowledgement by the ambassador of the reality of the situation in Gaza,” said Andrew Hall, then a crisis operations specialist for USAID.

The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem oversaw the language and distribution of most of the cables about Gaza, including those from other embassies in the region.

One former senior official said Lew and Hallett often told USAID leadership that the cables included information that had been widely reported in the media.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and representatives for former President Joe Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the fact that the cables never reached upper leadership of the U.S. government.